AWS CloudTrail

Track user activity and API usage

AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of your AWS account. With CloudTrail, you can log, continuously monitor, and retain account activity related to actions across your AWS infrastructure. CloudTrail provides event history of your AWS account activity, including actions taken through the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, command line tools, and other AWS services. This event history simplifies security analysis, resource change tracking, and troubleshooting.

Visibility into user and resource activity

AWS CloudTrail increases visibility into your user and resource activity by recording AWS Management Console actions and API calls. You can identify which users and accounts called AWS, the source IP address from which the calls were made, and when the calls occurred.

Security analysis and troubleshooting

With AWS CloudTrail, you can discover and troubleshoot security and operational issues by capturing a comprehensive history of changes that occurred in your AWS account within a specified period of time.

Security automation

AWS CloudTrail allows you track and automatically respond to account activity threatening the security of your AWS resources. With Amazon CloudWatch Events integration, you can define workflows that execute when events that can result in security vulnerabilities are detected. For example, you can create a workflow to add a specific policy to an Amazon S3 bucket when CloudTrail logs an API call that makes that bucket public.

How it works

Use cases

Compliance aid

AWS CloudTrail makes it easier to ensure compliance with internal policies and regulatory standards by providing a history of activity in your AWS account. For more information, download the AWS compliance whitepaper, “Security at Scale: Logging in AWS.”

Security analysis

Data exfiltration

You can detect data exfiltration by collecting activity data on S3 objects through object-level API events recorded in CloudTrail. After the activity data is collected, you can use other AWS services, such as Amazon CloudWatch Events and AWS Lambda, to trigger response procedures.

Operational issue troubleshooting

You can troubleshoot operational issues by leveraging the AWS API call history produced by AWS CloudTrail. For example, you can quickly identify the most recent changes made to resources in your environment, including creation, modification, and deletion of AWS resources (e.g., Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon VPC security groups, and Amazon EBS volumes).